This song has always been really fascinating to me for several reasons. it's plot can be extended and embellished into a major motion picture, but really this song is just one of those I always had a clear memory of even as a child but for the longest time did not know who the band was who did it or who wrote the song, but as soon as I found that out, I was just fascinated by the song's history. but let's just start with the song's lyrical content, it starts with a guy who keeps failing with girls and is desperately looking for some kind of cure to get him to have more success with the ladies, so he goes to this gypsy named Madam Ruth who happens to have this "gold cap tooth" in her mouth and her place is located on the intersection of 34th/Vine (and by the way there is no such intersection as 34th/Vine, at least in Los Angeles) and when gets there, he finds out that she has seven little bottles of this chemicle known as "love potion Number 9" and that's exactly what she pescribes to him after he lets her know what his issues with girls are and then what really makes the song interesting is that he goes into describing what the potion smells and looks like (specifically Turmpen Thyme and Indian ink) and then he proceeds to having a sample of this love potion and what happens is that his vision goes completely down the drain and can't tell if it's day or night and he starts kissing everything in sight but as soon as he kisses a cop in the same intersection where the gypsey was located in (34th/Vine) the bottle of Love Potion Number 9 gets broken but what's really interesting about this song is that yes it's about love but there is no one specific girl involved and the main subject in the song is not a girl or a romatic relationship but a bottle of chemicles which I firmly believe did not fix his girl problems but still made the song fun and entertaining nonetheless. it kind of follows the old cliche of the guy going to go see a fortune teller or a love guru looking for solution for his problems but instead finding something else entirely different then that. but anyways, this song was actually written by Two Brill Building Veterans Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller and originally recorded by a African American group the Clovers and their version contained an alternate lyric at the end "I had so much fun that I'll go do it again I wonder what wil happen with Potion Number 10" and whether or not Lieber and Stoller made this story up or if it was based off of anything real I don't know, but chances are the story was completely fictional and untrue. but regardless, the group that recorded this was a British group that was just on the heels of the Beatles in America and were the second british group to have hits in America after the Beatles along with Dusty Springfield. and they consisted of Mike Pinder, Tony Jackson, Chris Curtis and John McNally. they were signed to Pye records and were produced by the same guy that produced Petula Clark, Tony Hatch.